Director: Sandhya Suri
A widow steps into her dead husband's uniform and finds a rural Indian police force that runs on old habits and older prejudices.
What is Santosh about?
After her husband dies on the job, Santosh takes over his post as a constable through a compassionate-appointment scheme in a dusty district of Northern India. She has no training and no real authority, until the discovery of a young girl's body pulls her into an active murder inquiry. Inspector Sharma, a sharp and outwardly progressive officer, takes Santosh under her wing, and the two women work the case side by side. What starts as mentorship slowly reveals the machinery beneath it: caste lines, police shortcuts, and the quiet cost of keeping a job in a system that was never built for someone like Santosh. Director Sandhya Suri, working from her own background in documentary filmmaking, keeps the camera close to faces and procedure rather than spectacle, letting the investigation double as a study of who gets protected and who gets used.
Cast & crew
Shahana Goswami carries the film in near-constant close-up as Santosh, playing a woman whose confidence grows in small, uneasy increments rather than a single turning point. Sunita Rajwar plays Inspector Sharma with a mix of warmth and calculation that keeps the audience guessing about her real motives until late in the story. The supporting cast, largely drawn from the region where the film was shot, fills out the station and the village with unforced, lived-in detail.
Context & significance
Santosh premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 and went on to represent the United Kingdom in the international feature race, a co-production spanning France, Germany and the UK despite its entirely Hindi-language, India-set story. Suri spent years researching the lower ranks of Indian policing before writing the script, and that groundwork shows in the procedural texture of the case rather than in courtroom-drama shorthand.
Where & how to watch
Santosh is streaming on K-Time with Farsi dubbing and Farsi subtitles both available, so viewers can choose either option from the player settings. Reading this page is free; watching requires signing in with a K-Time account, and the whole experience, including menus and search, runs in Farsi for the diaspora audience.